Noel Pearson: Scaling up success in majority Indigenous schools
At a recent event called Scaling up success in majority Indigenous schools, Noel Pearson, distinguished orator, and Founder and Co-Chair of Good to Great Schools, spoke about Direct Instruction (DI), specifically his experience with DI programs in two primary schools in Cape York.
Illustrating his first encounter with DI programs, Pearson spoke about going directly to Siegfried Engelmann.
“So we went to the United States and called upon the inventor of Direct Instruction, Siegfried Engelmann at his National Institute for Direct Instruction that we wanted to do DI in our schools, and we’ve been doing it ever since."
In his candid speech, Pearson highlights the importance of DI programs in teaching the necessary literacy and numeracy skills to children from all backgrounds. He emphasises the operating principle of DI programs, that is, that they offer explicit, teacher-led instruction, and citing Engelmann, Pearson stresses ‘If the student hasn’t learned, the teacher has not taught. The responsibility for the child’s learning rests with the teacher.’
Pearson speaks from many years of experience, and his description of how DI works and how his schools have made DI central to their curriculum is an accurate and inspiring account.
“So let me tell you about DI. You do five lessons with the children, explicit teacher-led instruction with appropriate revisiting of the material for spaced practice. The program is based on mastery. We aim for the kids to master the materials and we administer a mastery test every five lessons. So once a week the children sit a mastery test and they don’t proceed to the next bit of learning until they have a 90% plus success in the mastery test. And the ingenious nature of the instructional design of Direct Instruction is that it is not old-style rote learning, there’s a lot of practice. If you want to move learning from short-term memory to long, you’ve got to revisit the material.”
Pearson shares the purpose of Good to Great Schools 6 C’s education model (Class, Childhood, Club, Community, Civics and Culture) and its importance in, not only teaching literacy, numeracy and science through Direct Instruction, but also in preparing children for opportunities to pursue their interests in high school and beyond.
In closing he discusses school reform and the key findings of several McKinsey reports, demonstrating how teacher-led instruction is crucial to lifting the performance of all learners.
“So what do we need to do? We need to make a performance shift in five years. We need to hit the bell curve in the right places. Okay, what do I mean by that? We need to hit the poor to fair schools and not accept that anywhere in Australia an Australian child is still attending a poor school. And that means the 250 indigenous schools that sit down at that bottom end of the system. We can’t accept that they should continue as they are. They cannot be put in that too-hard basket and left there.”
Watch Noel Pearson's speech in full and read the transcript on the Good to Great Schools website here.
Learn more about our Direct Instruction programs here or contact your Education Consultant.